ABSTRACT
Social-environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss are increasingly being understood as relational problems: problems that arise through how interpersonal and human-nonhuman relations are performed and cared for. Within sustainability science and transformations research, this has resulted in a growing interest in relations and relational theorizing and perspectives, emphasizing emergent relations rather than stable entities. Yet, how should we understand the nature of relations? The insights and results gained through taking a relational perspective will depend upon the ontology informing said perspective. In this chapter, I engage with Indigenous and posthumanist thinking on relations and relationality, arguing that these ontologies posit a deep relationality that not only allows for research and practice to center on relations but on the quality of such relations. While distinct on several accounts, I engage with both Indigenous and posthumanist scholarship to bring forth the sense of potentiality and responsibility inherent in a deep relationality—our potential to perform relations differently and our responsibility to do so. Through these tenets, a deep relationality centers on issues of justice and agency, and thereby has implications well beyond the theory of transformation by bringing to the forefront the importance of how we engage with change individually and collectively. I end the chapter by speaking to what embodying a deep relationality might require of us: practicing our relational sensibilities and our ability to hold complexity through being deliberate and careful in our engagements with change while simultaneously staying in action.
